The Wheatsheaf on Walsall Road does flame-grilled steaks, a Steak Ale Pie and a Mix Grill platter, in a dog-friendly beer garden. It's a Greene King "Flaming Grill" house — 4.3 out of 5 on Tripadvisor, 1,258 reviews on Restaurant Guru, most of them for food that arrives hot and fast.
The Star Inn does its own thing instead: pizzas, a Sunday menu, homemade cheesecakes, and Casque Marque cask ales alongside Caffrey's and four flavours of Thatcher's cider. At Christmas there's a set menu, £24.95 for two courses or £29.95 for three.
The Royal Oak, on Norton Lane, is plainer — fireplace, dartboard, car park, quiz nights and live sport. Olde Wyrley Hall does carvery on Wednesday evenings and Sunday lunchtimes, a choice of three meats and a wide range of vegetables, and reviewers keep singling out the lamb shanks. The Freemasons Arms, known locally as the Masons, sits on Stafford Road, reopened under that name after a refurbishment the Express & Star reviewed in 2011.
H.P. Westwood on Walsall Road is a proper butcher — locally sourced beef, Staffordshire spring lamb, Packington pork, and Friday delivery for anyone who can't get in. The post office is on Wardles Lane.
For walking, there's the Wyrley and Essington Canal towpath, known locally as the Curly Wyrley, flat and quiet, running past Pelsall Common and Rough Wood Nature Reserve. The Chasewater Heaths–Signal Box–Norton Lakeside loop is 5.8 miles. Chasewater Country Park itself began life in 1797 as Norton Pool, a reservoir feeding the canal, and now runs to sailing, wakeboarding and a heritage steam railway across 360 hectares.
Great Wyrley takes its name from the Old English for a clearing where bog myrtle grows. Coal came after, worked from the 1860s into the 1920s — the pit Wyrley No. 3, and a pub called the Davy Lamp that closed in 2010 and is now a Bargain Booze.
The more serious history is at St Mark's Church, built 1844–45, where Shapurji Edalji — a Parsi convert from Bombay, believed to be the first South Asian to hold a living in the Church of England — was vicar for forty-two years, having got the post from his wife's uncle, the previous incumbent, as a wedding present.
His son George, a solicitor so short-sighted he read newspapers inches from his face, was convicted in 1903 of maiming a pit pony one rainy August night, and sentenced to seven years' hard labour. Arthur Conan Doyle took up his case; historian Richard Davenport-Hines later wrote that Edalji "was incapable of complicated nocturnal excursions" on a night when "the vicarage was surrounded ... by a cordon of men through which he could not have penetrated." Doyle's campaign got George pardoned in 1907, and its exposure of a justice system with no right of appeal helped create the Court of Criminal Appeal that same year. Anonymous letters dragged the village back into the national press for another twenty-five years; a parish councillor's 1913 plea to stop linking Great Wyrley to them failed.
Landywood station runs trains to Birmingham New Street; the M6 Toll and M6 border the parish, and the X51, 803 and 1 buses reach Walsall and Wolverhampton.
Monday nights at Harrison's Sports & Social Club mean karaoke, and the football pitches and bowling green next door still belong to a welfare ground the miners raised for themselves the best part of a century ago.
